New and Old #126
Friday roundup and commentary
How Kroger Became the Biggest Sushi Seller in America, Wall Street Journal, Jaewon Kang, August 19, 2023
Sushi is a central component in Kroger’s strategy to expand beyond our grocery-shopping lists, and grab some of the dollars people budget for restaurants and eating out. The company’s executives say it’s working: Kroger’s data shows that the rolls bring new customers to its stores and encourage existing shoppers to visit more often. The grocery operator says it noticed in 2020 when it was reviewing data from consumer-research firm Circana Group that it was the nation’s biggest sushi retailer. It’s been grabbing an ever-larger share of the U.S. sushi market in the three years since.
Rather than cannibalizing other items in the prepared-food case, sushi has lifted sales of other prepared meals. Supermarkets are, however, eating into overall restaurant sales of sushi, Circana said.
When I write about food, I’ll sometimes get comments that I’m a little snobbish or have very expensive tastes. I think people underestimate how diverse and cosmopolitan Americans’ tastes have become and are becoming. As few years ago I was doing some random Google Maps exploring in honest-to-God middle-of-nowhere Virginia, and I read the handful of reviews for a little general store. Two of them mentioned the delicious samosas.
This is also interesting, given that, as far as I’m aware, sushi was basically unknown in most of America until the 1980s:
Restaurants in Los Angeles’s Japantown were among the first to pioneer sushi in the U.S. during the 1920s. As sushi bars proliferated across the U.S., supermarkets began experimenting by adding some sushi rolls next to their deli counters, and by the 1990s, grocery-store rolls were pretty common.
I wonder what obscure “ethnic” dish is being served in an immigrant-heavy neighborhood somewhere right now that will one day explode in mainstream popularity?
It also makes me think of the sushi rolls I used to get at ShopRite in the early 2000s, in central Jersey. They were made in-store, and were as good as your average restaurant. A few years ago they switched to more expensive and less tasty sushi, made by different people and with different branding. I still miss those old ones. A salmon roll, up to 2015 or 2016, was $3.50.
The article mentions supermarket sushi being cheaper than restaurants, but it depends which restaurants. Many supermarket rolls cost the same or more than the average restaurant price for the same item. You’re paying, in part, for convenience. I also think the lower end of sushi restaurants has proliferated a lot since I was a kid, such that a lot of restaurants are basically making sushi at a supermarket level, rather than the other way around.
Read the whole thing. It’s a great piece.
It may surprise people outside of Vermont to hear that the Green Mountain state has a housing crisis. We are used to thinking of housing affordability being a problem mainly in urban areas on the coasts. Vermont doesn’t fit either of those descriptions. And yet, housing is the single greatest challenge Vermont faces today. Vermont’s legislature is currently in session and housing is one of the hottest topics.
Also:
If you look at affordability as defined by the difference in what people make and what they need to afford a one-bedroom rental, the Burlington area (the only small metro area in the state) ranks 6th most expensive out of 119 small metro areas in the country. Only Atlantic City, New Jersey and four small metros in California are worse.’
And:
Losing young people, in large part because housing is so expensive, is one of the main reasons that Vermont is getting older.
This is an illustrated policy and data piece that’s also very readable. Give it a read.
‘Private Tyranny’ Is Less Private Than You Think, Reason, Stephanie Slade, October 2023
Even if you think there’s something unseemly about certain types of private-sector arrangements, there has to be a way to rhetorically differentiate between a situation that involves violence or the threat thereof and a situation in which one party to a transaction merely has more market power than the other.
I’m not a libertarian, really, and certainly not in an ideological sense. I’m much more skeptical of corporate power than Slade is—I think “violence” is far too high a bar for critiquing corporate power, when companies like Amazon or Airbnb can do things like shut down your account for no reason with no appeal, or when American land use relies so heavily on private developments. Cordoning off constitutional rights to government actions, in a country where most of life transpires in the private sector, means no rights most of the time.
But I’m also wary, to say the least, of authoritarian Catholicism, the subtext of the book she’s reviewing by Sohrab Ahmari.
You get this interesting dynamic in American politics—each side has, or is widely presumed to have, an ulterior motive, and so it’s hard to argue the merits of what people are actually saying. We all assume the argument itself is just a front for something else. I probably agree with Ahmari on corporate power more than I do with Slade on the limits of regulation and government solutions. But I’m more afraid of the ideology I think that Ahmari is concealing.
Maybe I’m being unfair. Give it a read; you decide.
What’s interesting here is not the snark or the product reviews, but this broader point:
This is a place where conservative boycotters overlap with something like 1990s Adbusters culture: There’s this idea that Americans are just mindless consumers who will put their little piggy noses in whichever trough is in front of them. In the ’90s this was a liberal-coded argument. There’s still a progressive left that critiques consumerism, but now if you’re fighting American corporate hegemony you’re usually perceived to be fighting corporate liberalism.
There’s a little more of this kind of analysis here. It’s a fascinating shift and it may be an important one.
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Thanks for the rec about the sushi article. For those of us in Texas, H-E-B has very good grocery store sushi and poke bowls, but they're definitely priced similarly to a restaurant. There's a large Korean population in Dallas, and for some reason many Koreans open sushi restaurants, despite Korea having its own tradition of eating raw fish that is a bit different from the Japanese style.